Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Lab/Cognitive Neuroscience of Cognitive Control and Memory Lab, Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, Brown University Providence, RI, USA.
Development of Language, Learning, and Action, Department of Psychology, Saarland University Saarbrücken, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2014 Sep 9;5:968. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00968. eCollection 2014.
Developmental researchers have suggested that adolescents are characterized by stronger reward sensitivity than both children and younger adults. However, at this point, little is known about the extent to which developmental differences in incentive processing influence feedback-based learning. In this study, we applied an incentivized reinforcement learning task, in which errors resulted in losing money (loss condition), failure to gain money (gain condition), or neither (no-incentive condition). Children (10-11 years), younger adolescents (13-14 years), and older adolescents (15-17 years) performed this task while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. We focused our analyses on two ERP correlates of error processing, the error negativity (Ne/ERN) and the error positivity (Pe) that are thought to reflect a rapid preconscious performance monitoring mechanism (Ne/ERN) and conscious detection and/or evaluation of response errors (Pe). Behaviorally, participants in all age groups responded more quickly and accurately to stimuli in gain and loss conditions than to those in the no-incentive condition. The performance data thus did not support the idea that incentives generally have a greater behavioral impact in adolescents than in children. While the Ne/ERN was not modulated by the incentive manipulation, both children and adolescents showed a larger Pe to errors in the gain condition compared to loss and no-incentive conditions. This is in contrast to results from adult studies, in which the Ne/ERN but not the Pe was enhanced for high-value errors, raising the possibility that motivational influences on performance monitoring might be reflected in the activity of separable neural systems in children and adolescents vs. adults. In contrast to the idea of higher reward/incentive sensitivity in adolescents, our findings suggest that incentives have similar effects on feedback-based learning from late childhood into late adolescence with no changes in preferences for "trick over treat."
发展研究人员提出，青少年的奖励敏感性强于儿童和年轻成年人。然而，目前对于激励加工的发展差异在多大程度上影响基于反馈的学习还知之甚少。在这项研究中，我们应用了一个激励强化学习任务，在这个任务中，错误会导致金钱损失（损失条件）、未能获得金钱（获得条件）或两者都没有（无激励条件）。儿童（10-11 岁）、年轻青少年（13-14 岁）和年长青少年（15-17 岁）在执行此任务时记录了事件相关电位（ERP）。我们的分析重点是错误处理的两个 ERP 相关物，错误负波（Ne/ERN）和错误正波（Pe），它们被认为反映了快速的前意识绩效监测机制（Ne/ERN）和对反应错误的有意识检测和/或评估（Pe）。行为上，所有年龄组的参与者对获得和损失条件下的刺激的反应都比无激励条件下的刺激更快、更准确。因此，这些表现数据不支持激励通常对青少年比儿童具有更大行为影响的观点。虽然 Ne/ERN 不受激励操作的调节，但儿童和青少年在获得条件下的错误比在损失和无激励条件下的错误表现出更大的 Pe。这与成人研究的结果形成对比，在成人研究中，高价值错误增强了 Ne/ERN，但没有增强 Pe，这表明激励对绩效监测的影响可能反映在儿童和青少年与成人的分离神经系统的活动中。与青少年具有更高的奖励/激励敏感性的观点相反，我们的发现表明，激励对从儿童后期到青少年后期的基于反馈的学习有相似的影响，而对“讨价还价”的偏好没有变化。
